


if you want to feel brand new

by sibley (ferns)



Category: Quantum Leap
Genre: Gen, Genderqueer Character, Time Travel, Trans Character, please imagine al is dressed in that weird gay little red outfit for all of this thank you
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-09
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-03-13 18:35:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28658082
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ferns/pseuds/sibley
Summary: The weird thing is, Sam isn’t sure he remembers what he really looks like.It’s funny how easy it is to forget considering for most of his life it was the only body he’d ever known.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 15





	if you want to feel brand new

**Author's Note:**

> Not _technically_ for Boost, but still basically for her anyway. Sam has gender. All of it. 
> 
> I've only seen a dozen or less episodes of Quantum Leap and they weren't in any particular order, so I'm sorry for any mischaracterization. I did my best. 
> 
> [ **CW:** this fic contains internalized transphobia, references to disowning, mentions of child injury/mentions of murder (not graphic, just the kind of thing Sam would need to stop), misogyny, the word "queer" used somewhat derogatorily, and outdated trans terminology.]

The weird thing is, Sam isn’t sure he remembers what he really looks like.

He knows the abstracts. He knows his face, sure. Or at least he thinks he does. His hair is brown. His eyes are… brown, maybe, or green, but they’re dark, he’s pretty sure. He knows the cut of his jawline, probably. He knows there’s an almost-unnoticeable bump in his nose because he accidentally broke it falling off the porch when he was seven. But things start to get a little fuzzy after that.

It’s funny how easy it is to forget considering for most of his life it was the only body he’d ever known.

The face looking at him now is only his for the time being, of course. Sam brushes his fingers down the bridge of his new nose and over the high cheekbones. She was in the middle of putting on makeup when they switched, and he accidentally smears some of the dark red lipstick onto his chin. The oil sticks to his fingers when he automatically tries to wipe his hand on his dress. At least it’s already black.

She looks almost like him. Or at least like what he thinks he remembers himself looking. But her face isn’t familiar enough to be one of his relatives. It’s funny, he can remember what  _ they  _ look like now that he’s had some practice at it, he just can’t call up a reliable picture of himself. He smooths down the skirt of the dress and adjusts the waistline until it digs less into his ribs. It’s simple dark… satin? Maybe? It’s soft and shiny and bunches under his hands.

He’s alone, so he has the time to swish the fabric around his legs while he looks around for a purse or a wallet or anything that might tell him about the person whose body he’s suddenly in charge of. His ears are still ringing from that concert he was just standing in the crowd of less than five minutes ago, the shriek of the bass stuck in his head. Al had still been there when he’d gone, it might take him a second to track him down again and tell him what the hell he’s doing here. 

Sam has no luck on finding the purse and identification, though, not until the door to what must be this woman’s bedroom opens and a man sticks his head through the door with a wide smile on his face. Sam learns her first name—Jacqueline—and that this guy is close enough with her to call her “doll” with enough warmth for it to be genuine, and that she’s wanted onstage in twenty-five minutes instead of forty.

The mad scramble to figure out exactly what they want Jacqueline to  _ do  _ on stage is anxiously familiar. At least he has time to figure it out instead of getting dumped right onstage in the middle of it all like the last few times. There’s no instruments in the room, or anything like that. If it’s a play, maybe Al could feed him lines, he’s saved his ass like that before, but if it’s a song (or, god forbid, another standup routine) then he’s completely screwed.

He finds a script. Lines highlighted. Major starring role. Flowers doodled in the margins. Okay. They can salvage this.

(“You make a pretty girl when you’re all dressed up, y’know,” Al says right when he gets there. He means it to be teasing. He must. 

Sam isn’t sure why he smiles genuinely while he rolls his eyes—Jacqueline’s eyes—at him. Why it makes him feel warm. “Yeah, yeah. Just tell me which one of these people is going to start throwing tomatoes at me first for flubbing my lines.”)

* * *

One thing Sam remembers is that when he was a kid he went a year and a half without cutting his hair. They just never got around to it, family too busy with life to wrangle their second son over something as inconsequential as his hair. It’d gotten so long that sometimes a new face in town would mistake him for a girl. He’d never minded it, even if it seemed to get under his dad’s skin—why did it matter? Why did his dad act like it was some big problem?

He only figured out later that it was a problem for boys to act like girls and girls to pretend to be boys. Back when he was six there wasn’t any reason to care. Especially because it wasn’t the weirdest thing Sam had ever done as a kid by a long shot. And sure, some guys have long hair, Sam’s seen a lot of them, but there’s still that hitch in his brain that tells him  _ he’s  _ not allowed to have it even if they are. 

Not that he thinks he’d look good with long hair. Hell, for all he knows he might already have an ugly mess of it back on his  _ real  _ body. If he does, he should cut it the second he gets back. Long hair only looks good to him on other people. Only on girls, really.

He plays with his hair in the mirror now. It’s pale blond like fresh corn silk. It goes down to the middle of his back—down to the middle of  _ Adrienne’s _ back, that’s the name of the nineteen-year-old girl he’s leapt into. He fidgets with the hem of the pale pink blouse, too, and the thin silver necklace with the horseshoe charm resting at the dip of his collarbone.

Sam tilts his head and Adrienne tilts hers back in the mirror. Her freckles and pale blue eyes stand out. When he was her age he was limbs and nothing else. He barely even looked like a man yet, certainly not in the way she looks like a woman. 

“Can we leave already?” Adrienne’s younger sister complains with a groan. “They’re gonna be halfway through the cake by now!”

Sam glances at the clock. Ten minutes to go until he can take her to her friend’s birthday party without having to worry about her getting hit by a car and winding up in a coma for the rest of her life. “Just a little longer.”

(“Don’t tell me you actually like those heels.” Al motions to the shoes in question.

Sam shrugs. Defensiveness makes his skin feel hot. Why does it matter if he could’ve taken them off ten minutes ago? They pinch his feet, sure, but they’re not… it gives Adrienne a boost. It makes him feel like he’s as tall as he knows he should be again. Yeah. That’s it. “They’re more comfortable than they look.”)

* * *

Sam’s not the one pregnant this time, now shunted to the more comfortable role of a midwife named Ashley. He  _ does _ feel grateful—those contractions were hellish—but there’s this sick sense of  _ longing  _ inside of him. Which is ridiculous. It was constantly uncomfortable and downright agonizing at the end. Dealing with Billie Jean’s stress about her family and the boy who’d gotten her pregnant on top of everything else was a nightmare. It’d been awful.

He’s only confused because he’s a woman right now. Taking charge of Ashley’s body and instructing one of her patients on what to do. Al says his only real job right now is to make sure everything goes off without a hitch so that the woman crying in bed right now doesn’t end up bleeding out, and so that Ashley went into the hall at the right time to intersect with the pregnant woman who would become the mother of her adopted son. Ashley just wants a baby of her own, that’s all. That’s why he feels like this. It’s a simple explanation. 

Sam tries to tell himself that. It’s only that this is what Ashley wants. He’s feeling her feelings. The discomfort in the center of his chest that he’s felt since… since he doesn’t know how long, the one he’s been half-attributing to homesickness, it’s just… it’s just stored data. His body remembering how it felt to be a woman. No—not—not to  _ be  _ a woman, he hasn’t ever been… it’s just what it was like to be  _ seen  _ as a woman, that’s all. That’s  _ all. _

It’s just homesickness. It’s just confusion at people not knowing who he is. It’s just—he needs to focus on  _ this.  _ On the task at hand and on hoping that next time he’ll be able to go home and be back to normal. Being Sam, not Billie Jean or Adrienne of Jacqueline or Ashley or (especially not) Samantha or anyone else. It’s just the knowledge that this isn’t where he belongs. None of it is, no matter how fulfilling it is to help people. It’s just nostalgia and confusion.

(“That eyeshadow is definitely your color,” Al says. It’s innocuous. It doesn’t even sound teasing. But it  _ is,  _ it has to be. Why  _ else _ would he say it? He’s just trying to poke fun at him because he knows there’s nothing he can do about it. 

“Can you just lay off? For  _ once?”  _ Sam tries to wipe the makeup off with the back of his hand with little success. Pale gold powder smears around his face. His throat feels tight. He needs to get out of here and onto the next one, and when he does—please let it be a man. Please.)

* * *

It’s a bar on the west side of Chigaco. Drizzling down rain and sticky with heat that they’re not supposed to get this far north for another few months. Bartending gig. There hasn’t been a single patron through the door who hasn’t hit on Sam—on  _ Sophie,  _ that’s her name—minus the singular other woman who is just as much a target.

Sam smiles through gritted teeth and accepts the tips. He’s supposed to make sure Sophie is in just the right place to literally win the lottery so she’ll have enough money for her father’s operation. And then stop her from getting shot in a random mugging the second she wins. Pretty cut and dry. Not very entertaining. Mostly just boring in the slimy way that comes from having to constantly deal with gross older man trying to call Sophie “sweetheart.”

It must be hard to be a girl all the time, Sam thinks. Having to deal with all of this constantly. It’s—it’s weird in a bad way and he doesn’t like it at all and he can take comfort in that. In knowing that he’s… what, not gay? He knows that. (He’s pretty sure he knows that. Men are attractive but everyone thinks that way. Even  _ Al  _ thinks that way and he’s the least-gay person Sam knows, minus all the times he’s mentioned kissing men for no reason. It’s different.) There’s nothing to take comfort in.

He’s only been Sophie for a day, and he’s buying the ticket tonight, so it won’t take too much longer. Then he won’t have to put up with these people anymore. Though he does feel bad that Sophie will need to keep grinning and bearing it.

This is easier than being a woman who has to dress up really nice in heels and makeup and a nice dress. Sophie owns blush and Sam tried it and is presently hoping it came out looking nice because it’s still on his—on Sophie’s face, but that’s it. That and the stuff that people put on their zits. He doesn’t mind it, the being her in general part. Sometimes it’s difficult but with her it’s alright. And her dad so far has only called her “Soph” and the shared  _ ‘S’  _ sound at the beginning makes it easier.

The homesickness is easier this time around. Maybe it’s just because he knows how to do this. Work a job for shitty pay and put up with boring and rude people. He’s not delivering babies or dressing up little sisters whose lives he has to save. There are some lives that make him feel like he could stay there forever. He almost stayed with Tamlyn. He could stay here.

Actually, the homesickness might be worse, if he’s thinking things like that. It’s stupid. It’s so stupid. He can’t stay here. Sophie’s a woman and that’s reason enough. Even if she weren’t also a real person currently waiting for him to be done with his trip piloting her body. He can’t—this is so stupid. The sick feeling is back now, anyway.

(“You can’t stay here,” Al tells him while he catches his breath, clutching his winning ticket and straining his ears to hear the sound of the mugger following him. He says it casually. Sam can’t remember mentioning to him that this was one of the lives that made him feel like he didn’t have to leave. 

“Who said anything about staying?” He huffs, and then the world goes sideways as the universe abruptly decides he’s going to be forcibly ejected from Sophie’s body and onto the next one.)

* * *

Her name is going to be Caroline. Her hands are calloused from working on her neighbor’s farm all day. Her cheeks are sunburned and peeling and there are freckles down the back of her neck. Her hair is short and practical and the knees of her overalls are filthy and Sam has no idea how to save her.

Al awkwardly stands behind him, a ways away from the muddy riverbank like he’s worried he’s going to suddenly become tangible and find his nice shoes stained. “She’s not going to die, at least.”

“Yeah,” Sam says hollowly. “But she’s never going to be who she’s supposed to be if I don’t say anything. And if I do, she never gets to talk to her parents again. How am I supposed to decide?”

Caroline’s safe and sound in the future—the present. Time travel is confusing to think about. But she’s safe. A seventeen-year-old girl who talks with the thickest Southern accent Al says he’s ever heard. She’ll grow up to be an artist who paints landscapes of the Texas wilderness she grew up in and the Wyoming mountains she’s going to move to. She’ll marry a nice man and settle down and have the life she’s supposed to. Own cattle and have some livestock dogs and pass away at a ripe old age.

Sam’s choice could change her life. He could make it so she never needs to leave home by tomorrow night. She’ll get to see her baby sister grow up and she’ll get to say goodbye to her parents when they die, one of pancreatic cancer and one of old age. That means something, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it? It’s the choice Caroline didn’t make, it’s the road not traveled, it’s the right choice, isn’t it? He’s supposed to be here so he can fix things for her. He’s only here because this is what went wrong in her life, isn’t it? This is what he has to fix. Right? If he doesn’t make this right for her then…

“How do I know I’m supposed to change it?” Sam throws a rock into the stream. “Just because I’m here?”

“That’s kind of how it works,” Al points out. He sighs and comes over so he can sit down next to him, sinking a good six inches into the clay by mistake. Not that he notices. “Look, the way I see it, Caroline’s got a good life either way. But I think she’d rather have a good life with her family than not.”

“Would she?” Sam punches the mud. It doesn’t do anything except make a dull sound. “I’d—I’d want my dad to still love me, if I was like her. But I’m not. I don’t know what she wants or how I’m supposed to get out of this. Why can’t you just  _ ask  _ her what she wants?”

_ “You  _ try asking a seventeen-year-old what they want to do in life and see where it gets you,” Al says dryly. “She already makes her decision, anyway. That’s what you’re here to change.”

“What if it’s  _ not?  _ What if I’m here for something else?” Sam watches the water swirl around hidden debris. “What if this is some kind of test? To see what’s wrong with me?”

“This isn’t about you, it’s about the girl.” Al gestures at the thin stand of trees around them. Desert-willows that forsook the dry soil around them for something with clean water. Their pink flowers sway in the breeze. “...What do you mean,  _ what’s wrong with you?” _

“I don’t know! I’ve just been thinking lately, about things, and I feel like this is supposed to teach me something, but I don’t know  _ what. _ I just want to get out of here.” He throws another rock. 

Al pats him on the shoulder, or at least attempts to. “You’ve been thinking that maybe you want to be a chick, right?”

Sam jumps and immediately unbalances, slipping right into the creek. The silty water comes up to his knees and Sam is immediately assaulted by the horrible feeling of wet denim. His skin feels hot and weird and wrong and there’s a panicky small animal somewhere in his chest. “No, I don’t! Why do you think that?”

Al stands up again, buried to his ankles in solid clay and chunks of stone. “The way you acted when you were helping Billie Jean keep her baby. That’s what first tipped me off. After that it was pretty easy.”

“Well, you’re wrong. I don’t want to be a  _ woman.  _ That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” Sam insists as he crosses his arms.

“So how you act when you leap into a woman is just, what, you trying to blend in?” Al crosses his arms too. “Act natural?”

“Yes! Nobody can suspect—you were the one who got all upset when you thought those government creeps were going to find out about the project when I was Stoddard! If—if anything, you’re the one who… who wants me to be a—a—” Sam flounders. “How do I know  _ you  _ don’t secretly want to be a woman?”

Al taps his foot, which is still obscured by the bank. Sam can only tell because his knee bounces. “Are you done?”

Sam’s shoulders slump. “...I’m done.”

“Great. Look, maybe are  _ are _ here to learn a grand life lesson. Or maybe I’m just way off. But nobody’s ever gonna know, right?” Al shrugs. “You’re a mile and a half away from anyone else. You’re, what,  _ decades  _ away from me, and I’m the only other person here.”

Sam eyes him, suspicious. “Since when did you become my therapist?”

“I’m not your therapist, I’m your friend.” It’s one of the more solemn things Al’s ever said. At least to him. Maybe he talks like this to Tina all the time. Of course he immediately ruins it by saying “now  _ spill,”  _ but it’s the initial thought that counts.

“I’m not a girl,” Sam reiterates. “Woman.  _ Chick.  _ Whatever.” The homesickness burns. A bubble of searing pain somewhere in his chest. “Alright? I’m just  _ not.  _ You’ve got it all wrong, Al.”

“Is Caroline a lady? Do you want me to go back there and ask her what she thinks about that?” He taps his foot again and uncrosses his arms so he can put his hands on his hips.

“Of course she is!” It comes out faster and harder than he thought it would. It’s not that… well. It kind of  _ is  _ that he might not have said that about someone like her before this. Before getting to peer into her private life and feel the  _ (unfamiliar,  _ it’s  _ not  _ something he recognizes, it  _ isn’t)  _ choking heat of how  _ wrong  _ everyone around her feels. It’s not like he really thought about it before. “I’m… I’m a part of her right now. I know how she feels. That’s  _ why  _ I don’t know what to do! If I’m supposed to make her give everything up just because she wants—”

He stops. The cold water has seeped completely through his boots. His ears are ringing a little and he can hear his heartbeat too loudly beneath it. Wants. That’s what she wants. She’d give up everything to be who history says she’s meant to be. Who she wants to be. It’s… she’s… 

The homesickness burns and it’s too close to the way he feels when someone calls for Caroline by the name that’s not going to be hers by this time next year. Homesickness for a place he can’t go back to. Not just in the sense that he can’t get home until he finishes this (does he  _ want  _ to go home? If the alternative is to help people? Does he want to give this up? Everything he’s experienced?) but something  _ more.  _ Longing to return to something that doesn’t exist. Never existed.

“I won’t change it,” he says. His voice sounds far away. “That’s not what she wants. That’s not what will save her. I don’t care if that means I’m stuck here forever. That’s what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know why I’m here, but it’s not for that.”

He’d stay. He’d stay and be the girl—woman, soon—that this person is supposed to be. Is going to be.

Al frowns. “So you  _ are  _ a transse—”

“No. I’m not. I’m the same—I’m the guy I’ve always been. I’ve just… sometimes it feels like… I don’t know. I don’t want to be a woman. I’m not one.” The thing in his chest is unstuck. Saying it doesn’t feel like a lie. He has to force the next words out. Even though they’re shaken loose they’re still clinging like burrs in his throat. “But I don’t know if the guy I’ve always been is much of a guy at all.”

The water sucks at the cuffs of his overalls. The air is warm but not warm enough that staying in the water is worth it. The thin trees don’t do enough to block the sun from shining right into his eyes. There are mosquito bites up and down his arms under his sleeves and they itch like hell. There’s a White-throated Sparrow whistling too-loudly from somewhere in the scrubland. Al still hasn’t noticed he’s standing partway through the bank but the way the light filters weirdly through that part of him makes Sam’s head hurt.

Al squints at him. “I think that still makes you a transsexual, Sam. At the very least you’re still a queer.”

“...Oh.” Sam climbs out of the creek like he should’ve done thirty seconds after falling in. Caroline’s clothes are even filthier than they were when he first arrived after she’d gotten done getting knocked into a mud puddle by a heifer. “I thought maybe it was something different, because I don’t have gender identity disorder. At least I don’t think I do. I’ve never met anyone who did.”

“I met a chick like that once at a bar,” Al says. “Guy, too, back when I was a kid, he was a little older than me. We didn’t find out until the day he got adopted that he’d been hiding all those skirts he’d been dropped off with. And I talked to Caroline. Never met anyone like  _ you,  _ though. Just sea sponges. And those birds, whadda you call them, with the big mane—”

“Gee, thanks.” Sam tries to wipe his mud-stained hands off on the soft leaves and bark of the shrubby trees around them. “Big vote of confidence. Getting compared to a  _ primitive life form  _ and a  _ bird.” _

“Eh.” Al moves to attempt to help him clean the mud off Caroline’s overalls like he’s actually going to be effective. “You were ahead of your time with Project Quantum Leap. The way I see it, you’re probably ahead of your time with this stuff, too.”

The sparrow sings again. Teakettle-pitched. The wet fabric doesn’t feel any better out of the water as it did when he was in it. But Sam’s not so sure the thin shivering that he can’t seem to get under control is coming from the cold or from the discomfort of the denim clinging to his legs.

“You can’t tell anyone,” he—he? Sam’s pretty sure he’s a he. He’s not a woman so he’s not a “she” and “he” is the only thing left—says. His mouth feels dry and he has to steady himself on the desert-willow. “I mean it, Al. Not  _ anybody.  _ Not even Tina. Please. Just let me keep Caroline on the right path, and don’t tell them about… this. Any of this.”

The thing he’d been calling homesickness turns over in his gut, where it’s now migrated to. Maybe “hope” would be a better word for it. Thin strands of desire for something he couldn’t ever put his finger on. The part of him that wants to be logical says this  _ is  _ logic. There’s plenty of things like this in nature, even if it  _ really  _ isn’t comforting to be told he’s just like a  _ sea sponge _ of all things. The rest of him is all wound up like copper and silver wire and conducting things that he shouldn’t be feeling but  _ is. _

It’s not just Caroline’s subconscious influence reaching back in time to her present. It’s not just the leftovers from the women he’s taken the place of. It’s him. It’s always been him. Just him. 

He’s still thinking about that when Al agrees that he won’t speak a word of it to anybody, and he thinks of it while he storms home because tonight is the night and Caroline’s life is going to charge forever and it’s going to be horrible but she’s going to be free. He can’t take that away from her. (He can’t take that away from himself. The chance for someone to know, even if it’s just one person for him.)

Caroline don’t need him to say it, in the end. He’s yanked away and her wet and dirty clothes are replaced by a clean flight attendant’s uniform and her sunburn is replaced by crisp makeup and her short practical hair is replaced by a bun. Sam never even got to talk to her, but it almost feels like losing a friend. Almost.

(“That’s my girl,” Al says when Sam successfully stops a bitter ex-boyfriend from taking bloody revenge on one of the passengers mid-flight in a crime of passion. There’s no buildup to it. There’s not even an acknowledgement of their previous conversation when Sam was Caroline between the Gulf Coast and the Hill Country. But he does cock his head to the side when he’s done like he’s waiting for the all-clear.

Sam laughs and the hope gets brighter.)

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me @augustheart on tumblr.


End file.
